Jim Rittenhouse's semidaily journal of news, commentary and reports
Is the controversy over building a mosque near ground zero a grand distraction or a grand opportunity? Or is it, once again, grandiose demagoguery? It has been said, “Nero fiddled while Rome burned.” Are we not overly preoccupied with this controversy, now being used in various ways by grandstanding politicians? It looks to me like [...]
My favorite conservative columnist, Daniel Larison, is hitting it on the head and out of the ballpark this morning about the mindless OMG’ing in the Beltway press and elsewhere about political dishonesty on national security issues. He brings up two main directions on this: if Group A is out of office, then Group B (who [...]
Discussion about a bailout bill for newspapers if they reorganize as 501c3 not-for-profits; the President had this to say about it: Obama said that good journalism is “critical to the health of our democracy,” but expressed concern toward growing tends in reporting — especially on political blogs, from which a groundswell of support for his [...]
I have been listening to enough rants, hate and nonsense in the last year and a half to last me a lifetime or more, and I’ve been more than fed up with it all. But I started realizing that this sort of crud is endemic; uninformed people who choke off their sources of information to [...]
I am frequently dismayed by various Truthers out there who insist on a Grand Conspiracy theory of the universe; stories about how the moon landing was faked, the world is flat, that 9/11 was an inside job and how Obama is some kind of Manchurian candidate smuggled into the country as a very small baby [...]
The short version seems to be that it’s unlikely without further explosions that Gov. Sanford of South Carolina will be forced to quit his job over the whole affair-affair, but it’s pretty certain that his political future is totally destroyed. This review from the South Carolina paper The State puts it in a nutshell, without [...]
Like nobody had ever heard of Russians using hookers to lure Western diplomats into compromising positions. Sheesh. The more I hear about the whole Senator Ensign story, the more I think that sex aside, the man should resign his office because he’s a crook and an idiot. Getting your bazillionaire parents to pay off your [...]
Dick Durbin and some other Senate Democrats are saying – dudes, you Democratic senators who don’t wanna vote *for* a bill we ‘re putting through don’t have to do so, but fer pete’s sake, nobody lost their seats for voting to shut off debate and bring the bill to a floor vote. The ‘close debate [...]
Daniel Larison thinks that the Republican leadership in Congress is rotted out and has to go:
Senate hearings today on GM and Chrysler dealerships being closed; sounds like there’s going to be a how dare you cut our constituents’ dealerships fuss. Such as: Sen. Byron Dorgan, D-N.D., who met with the GM and Chrysler executives on Tuesday, said Congress would not try to “go through the administration to get them to [...]
Interesting observation on the coming Supreme Court selection (which I am otherwise ignoring all the thrash over) in this blog; in short, the base demands that hell be raised and impossible demands be made on Obama to appoint another Scalia, which will never happen. Nor will he appoint a pot-smoking hippie. But the level of [...]
Well, the Senate can filibuster a Supreme Court nomination. And I have no idea who Obama will pick. But you can rest assured that the confirmation will be messy no matter who he picks, considering what’s been going on over the last little bit. I’m not looking forward to it at all.
I’ve been reading up on the Geithner Plan and other stuff related to it, and while I share the general levels of outrage of the present situation, I think Ezra Klein may have something in his analysis of the situation; that Obama and Geithner are more interested in how to handle the long road on [...]
The FDIC didn’t take insurance premiums from banks from 1996 to 2006 – because, well, everything was doing so well, and Congress didn’t want them to bother the banks. But Congress believed that the fund was so well-capitalized – and that bank failures were so infrequent – that there was no need to collect the [...]
Bristol Palin has decided that she’s had enough of Levi Strauss Johnston and chased him off to the Alaskan bush. Details in the 10 o’clock news. Hedge funds, no longer magically able to make money from thin air, are laying off tens of thousands of employees. Give them bonuses! The UK economy is looking at [...]